Attorney general asks sublet data from rental service

By Casey Seiler

Published 10:05 pm, Tuesday, April 22, 2014

The attorney general's office defended its subpoena Tuesday seeking data from New York state "hosts" who offer their properties for rent on the popular site Airbnb.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's investigation seeks to learn if Airbnb's hosts are paying all applicable state and local taxes on the services they offer to their renters. It also seeks to assess whether they're violating state Multiple Dwelling Law, which includes bans on rentals of less than 30 days unless the owner remains on the premises. Violating this provision is a misdemeanor.

The San Francisco-based company is seeking to quash the subpoena as an overbroad invasion of its hosts' privacy.

Issued in October, the subpoena seeks three years of information, including each host's name, address, user ID on the site and addresses of all their rental units, plus the date, durations and rents charged through Airbnb transactions, and the method of payment for each.

The 90 minutes of oral arguments before Acting state Supreme Court Justice Gerald Connolly also included an effort by the attorney general to seek the total gross revenue received by each host.

The office has said its own simple searches for properties on the site turned up hundreds of apparent violations.

Airbnb attorney Roberta Kaplan told Connolly that the subpoena had a "quite extreme and incredible scope," and said her client had repeatedly sought guidance from the state office on how its hosts might be subject to often vague tax laws. She also noted that since Multiple Dwelling Law applies only to New York City, the subpoena's request for information on all hosts in New York state ventured too far. (An Airbnb spokesman, however, noted that upwards of 90 percent of the sites New York rentals were in the city.)

"This is private information, confidential information," Kaplan said.

Connolly seemed responsive to the idea that the subpoena might be overbroad at least in its geographic reach, and in questions for both attorneys asked if it might be possible to address that problem in a narrower version.

"We do not have a problem with limiting the subpoena," assistant Attorney General Karla Sanchez said, adding the court had it within his powers to amend the order.

The popularity of Airbnb in New York City has upset the lodging industry as well as housing groups that believe the boom in private rentals is squeezing the perpetually tight residential market.

In response, Airbnb has mounted an aggressive public relations campaign, and insists that it's doing everything it can to eliminate bad operators — including professional property managers who hawk multiple locations on the site — from its listings.

"Today, the attorney general again made it clear that he remains determined to comb through the personal information of thousands of regular New Yorkers just trying to make ends meet," said David Hantman, Airbnb's head of global public policy. "We were proud to stand up for our hosts who share their homes and against this overbroad, government-sponsored fishing expedition. Cities like Paris, Amsterdam and Hamburg are embracing the sharing economy and New York shouldn't be stuck playing catch-up."